Friday, April 8, 2011

We Like A Quickie

After a busy and social weekend in which I gave a casual dinner party on Friday, attended a lovely dinner/birthday celebration on Saturday, strolled for hours around the Alameda Swap Meet (an amazing experience, by the way) on Sunday and entertained a delightful house guest on Monday by driving to Sonoma for lunch at the Girl and the Fig followed by wine tasting at the Buena Vista winery, I was wiped slick. After dropping the guest off at the airport, I went home and took a long, long nap.

When I awoke at nearly dinner time, I was still without energy for any kind of serious cooking. Thank heavens for the contents of the fridge and pantry - no shopping required!

I started boiling water for a package of Eduardo's penne pasta while I browned in olive oil the meat that I crumbled out of the casings of two Fra' ManiItalian sausages, then lowered the heat and added three minced cloves of garlic. As they sizzled together, I cut up broccoli florets and stems into bite-sized pieces, sliced three nice big radishes, and chopped some scallions. When the garlic was nicely fragrant, I added first the broccoli to cook for a minute or two, then the radishes. The penne was drained briefly and tossed into the pan with the rest of the ingredients and stirred until it was coated with all that garlicky, meaty glory before plating and serving with a hunk of ParmReg to grate over the whole.

The only thing I'd change about the entire weekend is that I'd use spicy Italian sausage next time. This was really good, especially considering it was a quickie, but it would have been even better with some spicy sausage bits, or some hot pepper flakes added. Still, we quite liked it.

Cookiecrumb, oh, _that_! :-) Poor Bill, he'll never live down his quickies.

Ms Mouse, cooking radishes is all the rage here, for some reason. These weren't really cooked, just sorta warmed so they kept their "bite." I'll await Cookie's reply - it will almost certainly make us laugh.